what a woman who could have joined the D.A.R. has learned about the socially-constructed, political notion of "race" by just paying attention and NOT keeping her mouth shut...

Sunday, April 06, 2014

Lindy West: "A Complete Guide to 'Hipster Racism'"

After two solid months of reading nothing to speak of but Facebook and "Tales of the City" by Armistead Maupin because I moved from one apartment to another -- downsizing by half -- while I was working fifty hours per week on my day job and keeping my hand in on some political organizing and some more stuff...I read this today (which I thought would knock me out and it did). There's nothing to do but re-post it here and hope nobody gets mad at me.

I considered letting it kick off a new feature under the category title of "Wish I Wrote This." But -- obviously -- I wish I wrote this because I'm re-posting it. With almost 3000 comments on Jezebel (where this appeared on 4/26/12), West doesn't need my help to put this out in the blogosphere, but I just want to make sure My Faithful Readers (who keep coming back even when I'm hiding out), get to see it. You're gonna like it. And some of us might learn something.A Complete Guide to 'Hipster Racism'by Lindy West

There's been a lot of talk
these last couple of weeks about "hipster racism" or "ironic
racism"—or, as I like to call it, racism.
It's, you know, introducing your black friend as "my black friend"—as
a joke!!!—to show everybody how totally not preoccupied you are with your black
friend's blackness. It's the gentler, more clueless, and more insidious cousin
of a hick in a hood; the domain of educated, middle-class white people (like
me—to be clear, I am one of those) who believe that not wanting to be racist makes it
okay for them to be totally racist. "But I went to college — I can't be
racist!" Turns out, you can.

People benefit from racism—hell, I benefit from it every
day—and things that benefit powerful people don't just suddenly get
"fixed" and disappear because Halle Berry won an Oscar or whatever.
Modern racism lives in entrenched de facto inequalities, in coded language about "work ethic"
and "states' rights," in silent negative spaces like absence and
invisibility, and in Newt Gingrich's hair. And in irony.

When people are trying to be sensitive about race but
they don't know what to say, they usually go with, "Well, race is a
complicated issue." Except, no, it's not. Race is one of the least
complicated issues that there is, because it's made up. It's arbitrary. It's as
complicated as goddamn Santa Claus. Oh, that guy's mom was half-black, which
makes his skin slightly more pigmented than mine, which therefore means that
he's inherently 12.5% lazier than me? Science! Um, no. What's actually
complicated is our country's relationship with race, and our utter ineptitude
at talking about it. We suck.
I mean, I work on it every day, and I'm still a total fuck-up. But this new
scheme someone came up with—where we prove we're not racist by acting as
casually racist as possible? Not our best, white people. Not our best.

Racism is like a wily little bacterium. It doesn't just
roll over and die once we swallow our antibiotics—it mutates and evolves and
hides itself in plain sight, and then all of a sudden, fuck, my arm fell off.
Dickhead bacteria. (Sidenote: arm for sale!)

A long time ago (not really!), it was socially acceptable
to own people. Then it wasn't, but it was
socially acceptable to murder people if they looked at your wife. Then it
wasn't! Yay! But it was still okay to say that people whose skin color you
didn't like weren't allowed to be around you. And so on. Eventually we arrived
at the point (now) where it's socially unacceptable in mainstream culture for
white people to say denigrating things about people of other races. But just
because the behavior has been suppressed, that doesn't mean people's prejudices
have simply disappeared. And white people haaaaaate being told what to do in
our own country (fun fact: not actually "ours")!

So racism went underground. Sure, you can't say racist
things anymore, but you can pretend
to say them! Which, it turns out, is pretty much the exact same
thing. There are a couple of strains of "ironic racism" making the
rounds right now, and a couple of typical defenses.

1. "Tee-Hee, Aren't I
Adorable?"
This category includes things like wide-eyed acoustic covers of hip-hop songs,
suburban white girls flashing gang signs, and this Tweet from Zooey Deschanel: "Haha.
:) RT @Sarabareilles: Home from tour and first things first: New Girl episodes
I missed. #thuglife." See, it's hilarious, because we aren't thugs—we are
darling girls, and real thugs are black people who do crime! Oh, hey, can I
call you back? I need to sew more ric-rac on my apron. I hope a black person
didn't get into my ric-rac Kaboodle and steal all of it! JK, LOL. RIP, Whitney.

(Now, I'm obv not saying that Zooey Deschanel is some
terrible racist. I don't know her, although I did sit next to her at a
restaurant once, and she ordered "olives." She seemed lovely, and she
didn't call anyone the n-word for the entire meal. But I'm saying that we are all kind of bizarrely
cavalier and careless these days, throwing our most deeply-considered morals under
the bus for the sake of a few cheap jokes. It's weird, and we owe the world a little more
critical thinking.)

2. "Recreational
Slumming."
Wherein privileged people descend for a visit inside the strange, foreign
spaces of othered groups. Like, I don't know, IHOP. Or that "scary"
bar in the south end. Then they go home again. Catchphrase: "It's soooooo
ghetto, but I actually totally like it!"

3.
"Ummm, I'm a Writer and I'm Trying to Write in Here!"
This is Lesley Arfin crowing about the majestic power of the n-word,
and white kids whining that it's "unfair" that black people
"get" to use "it". You know, because words are powerful and
words are Arfin's craft and would you take the color red away from the best painter on Twitter???
And besides, don't you just find Arfin to be so RAW and DELICIOUSLY NAUGHTY?
It's all tied up with the deliberately obtuse people who conflate "freedom
of speech" with "immunity from criticism." You "can"
say the n-word. Go ahead and say it if you want, Skrillex. And I will go
ahead and give you the world's most sidewaysiest eyeball forever. Because it hurts people. Why do you want
to hurt people?

4. "God, Don't White
People Suck?"
Okay, I get what you're trying to do here—having some fun at the expense of the
oppressors while setting yourself up as one of the "cool" white
people—but mainly what you end up doing is implying that black people don't
like informative radio or TED talks. Stuff White People Like: having
the best brains! Isn't it great that we can make fun of ourselves while still
reminding you that we're better than you?

And the thing is, when these things get called out, there
really is no defense. But they try:

"No, don't you see?
I'm just showing how I'm so down with [minority group] that it's totally cool for me to make
jokes at their expense. Because we are just that kind of tight bros now."
No. You cannot unlock some secret double-not-racist achievement by just being
regular racist. Otherwise Bill O'Reilly would be president of the NAACP.

"But it's a JOOOOOKE."
Here's the thing about jokes. They only work when they're aiming up. I wrote
this in another piece recently, but I'm just going to plagiarize myself: People
in positions of power simply cannot
make jokes at the expense of the powerless. That's why, at a company party, you
never have a roast where the CEO is roasting the janitor ("Isn't it funny
how Steve can barely feed his family? This guy knows what I'm talking
about!" [points to other janitor]). Because that would be GROSS, and both
janitors would have to work late to clean up everyone's barf. Open-mic
comedians, I know you think
you're part of some fresh vanguard in alternative comedy who just discovered
that a lot of black ladies don't like it when you touch their hair, but
pleeeeeeease just stick to stuff about how your stupid girlfriend is a bitch.
(Just kidding. Please never speak again.)

"So I'm not allowed to have a genuine interest in another culture?!!?!??!"
First of all, privileged dickweeds wearing Urban Outfitters "Navajo"
panties, I didn't realize that you excavated those in your anthropological
field work. My bad. Carry on. And second of all, again, you "can" do
whatever the fuck you want. You "can" wear whatever you want, say
whatever you want, and think whatever you want about whatever you want. All the
time! Yaaay! But if a group of people comes to you and says, "This thing
that you are doing is hurting
us," and you keep doing it for
fun, then you are a dickweed! Like, you know we had an actual
genocide here, right? A deliberate extermination of human beings? Right where
your house is? So maybe just err on the side of sensitivity.

"Yeah, but we have a
black president! Isn't racism over?"
Okay. That's probably the most racist thing you've said all day, imaginary
amalgam of all the careless hipsters in the world. You know how you can tell
that black people are still oppressed? Because black people are still oppressed. If you claim
that you are not a racist person (or, at least, that you're committed to
working your ass off not to be one—which is really the best that any of us can
promise), then you must believe that people are fundamentally born equal. So if
that's true, then in a vacuum, factors like skin color should have no effect on
anyone's success. Right? And therefore, if you really believe that all people
are created equal, then when you see that drastic racial inequalities exist in
the real world, the only thing that you could possibly conclude is that some external force is
holding certain people back. Like...racism. Right? So congratulations! You
believe in racism! Unless you don't actually think that people are born equal.
And if you don't believe that people are born equal, then you're a fucking racist.

But you know what? At least that's sincere. And at least
sincere racism isn't running around Brooklyn wearing artisanal suspenders and
masquerading as enlightenment. Give me sincere racism or give me no racism at
all, but enough with this weaselly shit.

1 comment:

The Oklahoma governor's daughter exemplified several layers of "insincere racism" in her posing with a headdress. However, given the rampant hypocrisy in a state which has the gall to adorn their license tags with "Native America" mottoes while at the same time routinely ignore their historical (and ongoing) oppression of those same Native Americans. Well, as you might note, "Why am I not surprised?"

I would mildly (because I'm presuming it isn't malicious in intent) chide the author for her speciesism exemplified in her remark "enough with this weaselly shit". No weasel ever behaved as abysmally (or as sneakily) as human animals.

ABOUT ME

I'm a writer, speaker, and sociologist who's made a life's work out of explaining exactly what I see happening in the world. Some people like it. Some people don't. But the ball is still the ball, no matter what kind of spin is put on it.